The indifference as hidden violence - on social dilution…

the beauty of the nature (photo: S. Thomas).

One of the chapters in Wikström’s book has the title “The indifference as hidden violence – on social dilution.”

There he writes that many seem to have a proper job finding themselves. They are working hard on finding themselves.

Too many reference points are in constant movement. New ideals come and pass in a few weeks. The compass needle isn’t even spinning. It has disappeared.

The share of time people see real persons seem to be shorter and shorter compared to the time occupied with ‘social’ relations with people one don’t know except via media.

And this is tragic, and all too common? But why is it like this?

Since the human being is playing together with more and more people (all TV-series’ different gestalts not to forget) at the same time as she meets them during more fleeting spaces of time a social dilution occurs. When the human being – as a pure survival instinct – is thinning her relations to other people out, it becomes the more important to cultivate her own inner being. My addition: maybe needed too?

He writes further about something I think is interesting: passivity constitutes hidden violence. Many people distance themselves from physical violence in words. In the next moment they show that they assuredly want but cannot manage to get into other peoples’ sufferings. Maybe the present time’s wealthy north-European is witnessing the sort of cruelties that in the future will be seen as as barbaric as the abuse of women seem for us today: the leaning back indifference.

But is it the people in power, with most resources, who do something, are taking responsibility? Or who are they working or even fighting for? Who are trying to take the burden on their shoulders instead? Even though they have just a fraction of the money and power other people have. Who take the guilt on them? Who are accusing themselves for being indifferent, selfish, thinking only on themselves, and who are not?

It’s not a social construction; women and children in Africa are starving to death by actual undernourishment, while people in the rich world are buying bigger and bigger and more gasoline consuming SUVs. This is called omission sin. Embarrassed he writes this to himself too (though I am not sure he owns a SUV!).

Maybe it’s so that those same persons whom once upon the time were eating lentil soup, stood on the barricades and accused the big companies for arrogance now are members of the cigar smokers club or the fountain pen’s association. Large-eyed kids are seeing their parents betraying their old youth ideals:

“Not even they are caring, why should we then?”

They (those parents) are showing the arrogance and cynicism they reacted at once?

Showing moral pathos is seen with suspiciousness:

“Wasn’t the 68-generation a little overstrung? Look at the big golf bags they are conveying to Arlanda now [airport outside Stockholm] and what sort of wines they are tasting in Toscana!”

Consumism, entrepreneurship, profit maximizing, Neoliberalism and market powers, buy and sell are code words. They are seldom called in question.

So the questions return – who sees the weak and try to do something – commonly and long-term. Where are the models whose pathos apply to other people, to the ones that cannot manage, cannot afford or aren’t strong?

Who are showing placards where it is written that how positively a person even thinks about himself there is fragility in the existence/life nobody can turn away from? The tragedy comes sooner or less.

Then “if you want a thing done well, do it yourself” isn’t true or the solution, but the human being is entirely in the hands of other people. So who liberates and canalizes the engagement potential (many people are only interested in their own personal projects entirely, are only seeing themselves?? And why?)?

See Arthur Silber in his essay "The Indifference and Denial that Kills" . I also searched on the obedience culture on Silber's blogg and got this hit.